In an earlier post, I talked about how melody is one of the primary elements of music that enables a listener to better grasp and appreciate a piece of music. Rhythm is the other element that helps to structure music and is half of what defines music. Music is taking dominion over sound in time. […]
Editor’s note: This essay is part of our series of monthly reflections on important works of music. Every month we’ll bring you a new post just like this one. Thanks to Lindsey Brigham for spearheading this project.
Living in Light of Fantasy: On Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy” Read More »
A maze of mismatched tables and chairs hosts a dozen simultaneous conversations. Some folks hunch forward, both elbows on the table, in fervent discussion; others lean back in the chairs, the better to illustrate their talk with expansive gesturing. On the tabletops, in hands, and (every now and again) spilled out onto the floor are
3 Mistaken Assumptions About Classical Music (through the Lens of Vivaldi’s “La Follia”) Read More »
How His “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand” Captures the Post-War Struggle for Hope
Some musical works, especially classical ones, resemble Mr. Darcy at the Netherfield Ball: they require a formal introduction for proper acquaintance (and woe betide the Mr. Collins who thinks otherwise). But other works, like other people, welcome strangers. It is sometimes possible to love a person before you learn his name and to understand a
The Music in the Water: How Bedrich Smetana’s “The Moldau” Makes Us More Human Read More »
Editor’s note: Welcome to the first post in a new series of monthly reflections on important works of music. Every fourth Monday of the month we’ll bring you a new post just like this one. Thanks to Lindsey Brigham for spearheading this project.
One of the talks I will be giving in July in Charleston at the Circe National Conference is about Jonathan Swift’s critique of Modernity. His insights into the problems caused by the modern world are profound and surprisingly relevant even three hundred years later. In a very simplified nutshell: Swift saw that the modern world
A Few Thoughts about Music, Story, and the Death of Poetry inspired by Jonathan Swift Read More »
I’ve always loved the section of George Steiner’s Real Presences where he describes the role of art as helping us get through the metaphoric “Saturday” space between the “suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste” of (Good) Friday and the “dream of liberation” and rebirth that is (Easter) Sunday. Steiner writes of this “Sabbatarian” aesthetic space: The apprehensions
Album Review: Over the Rhine, ‘Meet Me at the Edge of the World’ Read More »
